So don't stay mad

I spent most of today on a sweaty bus full of grumpy Romanians. The guy who wanted to trade seats with me because he had his dog with him (I guess he thought my seat had more dog room?) got mad that I don't speak Romanian. Then when I switched seats with him, some girls got mad that I was sitting where the dog guy told me to sit. The guy sitting next to me was mad at physics for making his stuff slide around every time we went around a curve (and there were a lot of curves). And the bus driver was mad at everything. He kept muttering under his breath and yelling and honking and throwing his hands up in disgust at the slow drivers in front of him and the fast drivers going into his lane to pass and the horse carts and the pedestrians. Sometimes I find it oddly calming when everyone around me is mad. I listened to self-absorbed guilty pleasure pop songs on my iPod and looked out the window and thought about how great the world is and how lucky I am to be able to explore it.

After about four hours, I was as grumpy as the bus driver. Why is this bus not air-conditioned? Could the driver please turn that godawful music down? Why does Romania not have any motherfucking highways? The road was two lanes the whole way and went through the center of each town we passed. And why do we have to stop in each goddamn town? It's the EU for fuck's sake--why are there no direct buses in this goddamn country? And how in fuck has the guy across the goddamn aisle managed to invade my space?

What ended up fixing my mood was a series of holes in the road. They were these unmanned, barely marked craters that took the 'highway' down to one lane and left it up to the drivers to avoid crashing into each other. The bus driver kept getting fist-shaking mad and it was all absurd and hilarious and I listened to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and got back to being amused by it all. And, I saw some baby horses. Life is pretty good.

I'm not currently in the right place, though. I saw the delta; I'm done with Romania for now. But without a car or a driver, you can't get from Tulcea to Moldova in one day, and my driver-finding powers are not absolute. The Romanian transit system was not designed with my current trip in mind. So, I'm still in Romania. Iaşi (pronounced yash) seems like a perfectly nice place to spend a day or two, but I'm just using it for a place to sleep. Sorry, Iaşi.